Sharing and collaborating with Google Docs: The influence of psychological ownership, responsibility, and student's attitudes on outcome quality

One hundred and eighteen undergraduate students participated in an experiment which tested the differences between shared- and collaborative- writing of an assignment. Participants were randomly allocated to one of five groups that carried out different types of collaborative writing. Psychological ownership and responsibility for the document quality differed across the groups. Level of ownership and responsibility increased after collaborating by suggesting comments to a peer's draft and decreased after editing a peer's draft. Initial ownership and responsibility, as well as students' attitude towards collaboration, predicted perceived outcome quality. Evaluation of collaboration was asymmetrical: participants felt that their contribution improved peer's draft, whereas peer’s contribution deteriorated their own draft. We conclude that collaboration is superior to sharing, and improvement suggestions are preferred over editing